I’ve had friends of various types throughout my life. But the first time I ever encountered the phenomenon of internet-only friends — “nonlocal acquaintances” — was about six years ago.
It was via a message board used by candidates for the Chartered Financial Analyst exam. The CFA Institute offers candidates various online resources, including message boards keyed to certain topics: One for each exam level, one for career advice, and so on. Of course the most popular board was the one labeled “Off-Topic,” where anything went…until it didn’t, in the opinion of the board’s lone paid moderator (who was a CFA candidate just like the rest of us).
In response to this official rebuke, some of the more social “Off-Topic” participants created a separate, password-protected board. In this we were led by the youngest of our group, a twenty-four-year-old credit analyst who had attended boarding school and who was quite accustomed to keeping track of her far-flung friends via the internet.
These CFA folks were my first nonlocal acquaintances. There were about a hundred of us on the board. I wound up meeting about a dozen of them in person, because CFA types tend to come through Boston frequently (for jobs or conferences or what-have-you). But I came to know the others — the ones whom I never met in person, but only interacted with online — reasonably well too: their personalities, their significant others, their vacations. I read the jokes they posted every Friday, and followed their job searches through various industries and occasionally across continents. I would never meet most of these people in person, but that didn’t dampen our interactions at all.
Next up was Gawker, where I became a commenter during my first year of law school. This wasn’t the wisest timing, of course — but looking back, it was kind of foreordained. There I was in grad school, mostly isolated from my “regular” (“IRL”) friends, with a computer open in front of me basically every waking hour. Under those circumstances, making new friends online can seem like the most natural thing in the world.
And ah, yes, Gawker. This isn’t a full-fledged memoir — I’ll save that for my literary agent — but man, the social aspect of that website really sparkled in the old days. I “met” dozens of folks — in the comments, via private message, and occasionally via e-mail. On Gawker, you usually encountered someone’s sense of humor first. Which is a pretty powerful and alluring way to meet someone.
And it can also be a high predictor for compatibility — maybe sometimes. In two exceptional cases I wound up having real-life encounters with women whom I “met” via Gawker private messages. I guess you could refer to these meetings as dates: first dates, I guess, but with a lot of familiarity already built in. One encounter turned out to be absolutely thrilling and changed my life utterly (if only temporarily). While the other rendezvous was unutterably sad, and to this day I thank my lucky stars that I managed to dodge an even more unfortunate outcome there.
By the time I joined Facebook — after being cajoled into it by a particular (and particularly charming) Gawker commenter — the idea of pursuing a mostly-online social life was no longer foreign to me. I was still in graduate school, and still in front of a computer sixteen hours a day. Joining Facebook allows you to keep in contact with your IRL friends as well, of course. But for me, Facebook is my primary (and usually sole) opportunity to engage with my online-only friends — those people whose real lives are still mostly unknown to me.
So now I’ve listed three possible sources of nonlocal acquaintances — but a full taxonomy could run to dozens of categories. Maybe hundreds. How interesting a topic would that be to revisit in twenty years or fifty: Collected reminiscences of all the ways in which people connected with each other, during the first decade-plus when social media existed? Additional sources I could cite would include 4chan, Reddit, and the much-mourned Wordsmoker. But who knows which online communities might be cited by other folks? Comment sections on NYT or Slate articles? DeviantART or Fetlife? Twitter? Consumer-product lifestyle forums masquerading as tech-help boards? (Apple, Honda…Astrogilde?) And good God, what about Tumblr? Think of all the Tumblrs out there; all of that reblogging must lead to something else, occasionally.
But an even more interesting inquiry might be: What unique kinds of relationships tend to spring from these sources? Most connections are probably fleeting and barely deserve to be named. While others develop into the types of IRL acquaintance-ships familiar from the pre-internet world. But what about those connections which don’t fit into traditional categories — those enduring but online-only connections? Might these be a qualitatively new development in most people’s experience? Does maintaining such a connection require new rules of etiquette, new protocols, different habits of emotional hygiene? What expectations are reasonable? Which possible paths might such a relationship follow? In my view, we’re still blinking in the dawn of this new development in modern social life. Who knows what the landscape might look like when the sun finally comes up?
Image: Flirckr
